It was a busy Tuesday morning. I had just walked out of my annual physical exam back through the waiting room to head to my car. I was hearing odd snippets of conversation around me. “I think it was a bomb…or maybe a plane..”, “New York City…”. I wasn’t sure what was happening but people looked worried, grieved and tense.
I got into my mini van and dialed up my husband at work in downtown Atlanta to let him know how my physical went. His voice sounded exactly like the people in the waiting room. He asked,”Have you heard what happened?” After my response of no, he proceeded to explain the horrors that had already occurred. This was before the second plane had hit. I drove the ten minutes home and immediately turned on the television. It would stay on all day as I stared in disbelief at the collapse of my known world. I was a child of the cold war fears. We feared nukes, crazy impetuous Russians who would annihilate us for political gain, or a jumpy American who would instigate world wide mass destruction by impulsively “pushing the button”. I had never feared that I could be on a plane one morning that would become a weapon in the hands of a fanatic. I had seen hijacking footage on the news throughout my life. But they always seemed to have an agenda that required them to live through the experience. This was not that type of hijacking. This was a weaponization of a human life, of many human lives. It was beyond my ability to comprehend. Who could hate a people group enough to do such a thing? There were school children on one of those planes.
My children came home that afternoon and I had to explain it all to them. It was simple for me. I didn’t try to sugar coat it or come up with some euphemism for the horror that came to our shores. I probably should have been a little more genteel, but I was in a bit of shock and just dispensed information without much of a filter. I had heard in a couple of days they took the footage of the planes hitting the towers off of the television because it was making children think that the event was happening over and over again and not that this was the original event being shown again. Then it was said that the images were toned down to keep Americans from getting too angry. I had one question. Was there really a level of anger that was too much for what we had suffered?
Even all of these years later, I don’t think I have fully processed this event. I have been seeing all of the videos and pictures on the internet and the memorial testimonies. These have shown me that part of me will live in the shock and horror of that day forever. Other parts will build from that and become something new, but not all of who I am. I have to make peace with that. Honestly, I just want the people that hate us to move on and let us be and have our soldiers come home and we can let our enemies be and try and build our new country. I’m just done with the hovering and instability that we’ve had for the last 10 years. Enough already! But I know that it’s not possible. And that is the great damage that was done on September 11, 2001. There is so little of the real America left and our politicians of both parties seem ever so ready to sell off what is left in a quick fix approach to a profound shift in our nation. So, as I remember I mourn but I also struggle to hope because I can’t let the terrorists win. I won’t give up on America. She is worth saving!
